A lot of hard work goes into FOSS and the communities around it; and most of my time has been community centric and not code. In part its because I’m busy on the community side and partly a sense of cautious sense of ‘someone else would be better at making that contribution’.

Friday however, brought around the stable release of PHP 7.1 (hi 5 to the PHP7.1 RM’s!). I decided to admit my lack of knowledge, and figure out how to help get PHP 7.1 stable into homebrew for everyone.

Most of the leg work had already been done (so I can’t claim any of that credit). Luckily, it turns out that bumping the minor version is simply a case of:

bumping the src hash

bumping the version reference/names

and (I learned later) bumping the revision so bottle-bot does a re-build!

See here’s the thing.

Asking for help, and admitting I didn’t know something was the hardest part of the contribution!

This is a short post.

Take the opportunity to ask for guidance, make a small contribution, and help keep FOSS projects awesome.

And a very big thank you to Jan and Andreas for showing a new contributor the ropes. You made contributing a delightful experience!